


dennis rigs the rating system (aka, dennis's gay sexcapades)

by kk_writer



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Angst, Bisexual Dennis Reynolds, Canon-Typical Hijinks, Closeted Character, Dennis Reynolds POV, Dennis/OMCs, Episode: s10e02 The Gang Group Dates, Explicit Language, Homophobic Language, I hereby declare Dennis Reynolds to be vainsexual, Internalized Homophobia, Jealousy, M/M, Meta, Religious Guilt, Retcon, Season/Series 10, Unreliable Narrator, Violence, aka he's into whatever bolsters his self image, it's pretty light except for a couple parts, unreliable narrator is my fav, wow the tags make this sound darker than it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 12:20:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18282293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kk_writer/pseuds/kk_writer
Summary: When Dennis doesn't get the ratings he wants with women, he decides to switch to men. It's the perfect solution. What he doesn't anticipate is the gang's reaction to his newfound success. Well, he could've anticipated Mac's. The rest of them are just being assholes.





	dennis rigs the rating system (aka, dennis's gay sexcapades)

**Author's Note:**

> Well. This is different from the other stuff I've posted. Commonality between Voltron and IASIP: they both have gay characters who have an obvious romantic partner that the show decides to disregard for some reason 🙄
> 
> Rated "explicit" not because of sex scenes per se - more so because of language and adult situations typical of the show. See end notes if you want more info about the Dennis/other or violence tags before reading. 
> 
> Apologies in advance for the dick emoji scene breaks. Seemed like a good idea at the time...
> 
> x

Dennis is soooo very over this rating system. Two more group dates in, he now has a _zero-point-five-star_ rating. 

Zero point five stars. He didn't even know the scale went that low. 

Who do these women think they are? Just tearing a man's soul to pieces like garbage, like Dennis is anything less than a god among men? 

He's fuming over his score when Dee walks her date to the door and then gives the poor bastard a one star rating, right in Dennis's face. She's blathering some nonsense about her "D.E.I." system.

Goddammit. Everyone should really just stop trying to copy the D.E.N.N.I.S. system. That's what got them all into this mess in the first place. That's what got him into a group date with Mac and Charlie, and if they hadn't botched the whole thing, Dennis would have a perfect rating right now. 

He stops listening halfway through her tirade about empowerment or some shit. The blood is rushing through his head and pounding in his ears and Dennis can't _think_. 

Dee. Dee is part of the problem. They all are, Frank and Charlie and Mac. The whole goddamn lot of them keeps getting in his way. Not to mention, letting women gather in groups was a bad idea anyway. They clearly felt too safe among peers. 

If only Dennis could get these women alone...

-╰⋃╯ -

A few days and multiple failed dates later, Dennis is near the brink. He's had it up to here with everyone being so illogical. One mention of Raters, and his dates are fleeing like he's...like he's Mac or Charlie. Like he's not _Dennis fucking Reynolds_. 

Ever since he learned he had a profile on Raters, he's been refreshing his page every few minutes. He even found a way to claim the profile and sign up for alerts. Which just means he's now paranoid every time he gets a text. It's taking over his whole life. Just this morning (late morning, early afternoon, whatever), he woke up from a vivid dream where he was trapped in a pink and glittery room while through a screen, women from all over the city were walking by making comments like, _too short_ , _too frumpy_ , or just _gross_ , their noses wrinkling in disgust, and when Dennis looked down at himself he was wearing hideous clothing he would never be caught _dead_ in, and...

And then he woke up and checked Raters. 

It was all made up. That was it. It was all the product of some nightmare. There was no way...

Shit. It was real. 

What now feels like hours later, he's still in shock, staring blankly at his profile from Dee's lumpy, horrible sofa when she walks date number...is it five? Six? To the door and casually drops onto the couch beside him to dole out her one star ratings. 

It's already been proven that zero star ratings are possible. Dee is probably just too stupid to realize that, and Dennis has no intention of clearing that up for her. The one star ratings are bad enough. 

Zero star ratings are, in fact, devastating. Dennis would know. 

He's never visited other profiles on Raters, but then, why would he? He's transfixed right now, though, watching Dee scroll through hot guy after hot guy. One star, one star, one star. 

Does she have any idea what she's..? 

Dennis may or may not be fantasizing about slicing Dee's skin open for the tenth time in the last few days when he sees it. 

He may be hallucinating, but he's pretty sure the last guy she rated had something different on his profile. 

"Stop," he says. He must still be in shock. His voice is too quiet to be heard over Dee's chatter. He pulls himself together as best he can. "Stop. Dee." She's still not listening. "Goddammit Dee, I said stop!" His voice reaches a truly high-pitched screech that makes his own ears ring. 

She turns to face him, hand still poised over the keyboard. Her eyes are wide, and she looks incredulous. 

"What the fuck?" she says. 

"Go back." 

"Go back..?"

"Through the profiles, Dee," he spits out through clenched teeth. "Go back." Dennis is shaking a little. Maybe a lot. 

"Whaaat the...Dennis, are you taking your pills?" She's got her hand hovering over the keyboard, but her eyes are on Dennis, and she's leaning away from him like his crazy might be catching. 

Oh, for...Dennis leans over and bats her hand out of the way, clicking through until he sees it. 

"There. What's that." 

"What's what...oh, you mean Greg? Yeah, fuck that guy, right? He been Dee'd, unnh." 

Dennis shudders. "Never make that sound again. No. I'm talking about that. What's that." 

She squints at the screen and reads, " _In...the wrong place? This person has a...profile on...Guy-raters..._ " 

"Yes, Dee, I can read, honestly, which you apparently can't do. Do you need glasses or something? Never mind. What the hell is Guy-raters?" 

"Oooooh, yeah, you're right, that totally blows a hole in the Dee system..." 

"What are you even...wait, is there a _ranking website_ called Guy-raters?" 

"Yuh-huh," she clicks the link next to the text and it goes to...basically the exact same website but with a bunch of half-naked men in the background. 

"Guy-raters, a place for the...a place for the gays? That is super offensive. What is this, Dee."

"Oh yeah, it's the gay version," she says, pointing at the slogan at the top. She cringes a little. "It is a little...offensive...but it's got way more traction than Raters, yeah, people love it..." 

"The name though..." 

"Oh yeah, it's awful," Dee agrees.

"And the slogan..."

"Horrible. Yep. Oh, shit, look. That guy has such a good rating on here! Look at that. Good catch, Dennis, you're totally right. I need to avoid those tricky bisexual ones. Can't bring their confidence down if they already have high scores on Guy-raters... You know, I thought for a second there you were going of the deep end, but you were really just watching my back, right?" She punches him in the shoulder. 

"Ow! No, that's...that's not..." 

"Oookay." She cracks her knuckles like she's getting ready to step into the ring. "Momma's gotta batten down the hatches. Straight men only." 

"Whoa, that sounds..." 

"Yeah, came out poorly. _Men on Raters only._ Gotta weaken their spirits with those one-star ratings." She's got a look of maniacal glee on her face.

"Jesus, you are a monster," Dennis frowns at her. "I feel like we skipped right over something there, though. Are you saying there's a whole other website for rating dudes?" 

"Yuh-huh. There's one for lesbians, too, it's, ah...can't think of the name right now. Like no one uses that one though. People are just not interested in rating women...judging women already happens enough in real life I guess..." 

Jesus, he really doesn't care. 

There's a whole other website.

There's a whole other website, and Dennis has never cared what gay Philly thought of him, but there's a whole other website with a completely unique rating system and, well, anywhere's better than nowhere. 

Dennis is a five star man. 

Dennis can be a five star man.

He just needs to bang some dudes. 

(cue scene-change music) 

-╰⋃╯- 

Dennis is so not ready to bang some dudes. 

Oh, don't misunderstand, he's super into it. It's just...it's been a surprisingly long time since he last fucked men. 

Why has it been so long? Well, you see, the _why_ of the whole thing is unimportant, really. Suffice it to say, Dennis gets more of a thrill out of banging women. Everything just works out better in the world when he's banging women. He knows this, on some deep and visceral level, and if he stops to think about it, he'll probably remember why switching to men feels like such a bad idea. 

Remembering that reason is the last thing he wants. Nothing is going to waylay this plan. 

All that matters right now is that he's obviously still into dudes, always has been, and right now he really just needs to focus on the ratings. That takes priority over almost everything else. 

He's envisioning the looks on those women's faces when they see his Guy-raters profile, see that he actually is a five star man, see that he has absolutely no interest in them whatsoever. Nothing brings women around to a positive impression like them thinking you're completely and utterly disinterested in them. Hell, his point-five-star rating will start to look like a badge of honor. Of course he does poorly with women, people will say. They just don't possess the qualities he's looking for. 

What Dennis will really be doing, though, is building his confidence back up. Because, see, he has a system with women. Women are tricky. They're a challenge. They tend to say no, and Dennis loves, loves, that moment when the no fades from their minds and they give over to the situation. 

It's not...it's not like it sounds, though. He's not hurting anyone. No, he just loves the challenge. And women are way more challenging than men. 

Men are easy. 

Usually, that's a turn-off for Dennis. But right now, easy could be just what he needs. He needs to regain his considerable confidence. That is, after all, what makes the D.E.N.N.I.S. system work. 

He'll spend some time with men, get his confidence back, and go back to Raters. 

See, more than ten women have already scored Dennis very poorly on Raters. To get close enough to a five star average for Dennis to be happy, he'll need to get...well, he's not doing the math right now, but it will take a significant number of five-star ratings from women to get that score where he wants it. If he keeps trying now, he'll just keep failing. Once he gets his game back, though, he'll power through those women, no problem. 

This is perfect. This is gonna work. 

Okay, so getting men is a piece of cake. Getting men to rate him well after these dates might be a _little_ more difficult than just catching their interest. After years of sleeping with women, though, he's had plenty of practice in the art of subtle manipulation. He'll just need to get a read on their interests, play into their desires, and bam, five star rating. The level of manipulation required will be almost laughable. It'll be the same amount of manipulation most people perform on a daily basis. Meet someone new, get a read on their personality and their interests, and play up certain aspects of your own character based on what you think will go over well. He won't even need to play a role, here, very much. He'll just need to be intuitive. 

Dennis realizes he's been zoning out on Dee's couch for a while. The light looks different in the apartment. By the sound of it, Dee is long gone, and even Mac has left for the bar. Huh. He missed a lot.

No matter. Dennis pops into the bathroom and spends his standard hour on grooming. He's not doing anything extra - just the usual, which is everything. That's the trick. Dennis is always date-ready. He's always ready for anything. 

While he drives himself to the bar, Dennis realizes he's actually excited for this, a little. Maybe even beyond the rating thing. He has some planning to do, but after that, Dennis is feeling good and ready to bang some dudes. 

Here's the thing. Women are great. They're soft and curvy and pliable and willing, once he puts in the effort. 

Banging men gives him something totally different, though. Men are more willing to pay attention to _him_. Cater to his needs a little. Sleeping with women is more exhilarating, but sleeping with men is more...instinctive. 

Sure, there are some women out there who go after what they want and put on the chase, but again, Dennis doesn't like that with women. He likes the intellectual challenge of being the one doing the chasing. Not for keeps, or anything. Once he's banged these women, he starts to lose interest pretty quickly. 

Not so with men. It's been years, but in college, he fucked a lot of men, almost exclusively. It got addicting after a while. He's even been known to bang the same guy more than once, if the guy is any good. 

All that to say, he's actually looking forward to this. It can't be a long-term thing. Dennis has to be Dennis. He can't just stop chasing what he wants. That would be way too out of character. But needs must, and right now, Dennis needs to bang some dudes. If it's enjoyable, all the better. 

He unlocks the bar, ignores the gang altogether, and heads into the back office, locking the door. He needs to focus. 

Dennis starts by doing something he apparently should have done from the beginning - he pulls out a laptop and digs around the rating sites for new information and clues. He'd been too distracted by his own profile before, but things are different now. He needs all the information he can get. 

Dennis needs to beat the system. 

Just like Greg, Dee's bisexual one night stand, maybe one out of every twenty or thirty men on Raters has a link to a Guy-raters profile. It looks to be automatic - some of them are just coincidental, the same name with the same spelling but with photos showing two very different men. 

There's no Dennis Reynolds on Guy-raters yet, so he adds the profile himself because once a photo is uploaded, it's permanently attached to the profile. Best to get ahead of these things. He chooses a headshot he used in some acting scheme a while back. It's professionally done - Dennis hadn't skimped on the cost. He was the only one of the gang to bring in a portfolio of professional headshots to their agent meetings. As usual, he'd been the one to carry the scheme along. Until the models had ruined everything, that is.

Either way. The profile is taken care of. 

Now he just needs an angle. 

Based on the few dozen profiles he sifts through, most of the men on Raters have been scored by only one or two women each, some by as many as ten women. That checks with what he saw of Dee's dates. On Guy-raters, though, most of the men have five or ten scores at the minimum, all the way up to twenty or thirty for a few. 

So it's more common for men to rate each other after dates. That's useful. That means Dennis is more likely to get rated here, especially if he picks his dates from the men who already frequent the site. That'll save him from bringing it up awkwardly in conversation. _Hey, oh, are you on your phone? Could you rate me while you're on there?_

Asking directly has clearly not been going well. Dennis is relieved he's found a fairly reliable workaround. 

So. He's picking from men who frequent this Guy-raters website already. That's one criterion, but he needs more to go on. 

It looks like a lot of the guys' scores are higher on average on Guy-raters, too. He's not sure what that could mean. Maybe guys are more forgiving in their scores. ...That seems unlikely, though. Some gay men are laid back, but most of them can be critical bitches. 

Something else must be going on. 

The higher averages could also mean that these men are handing out positive scores in the hopes of receiving positive scores in return. 

If that's the case, Dennis just has to pick some men who look nice but have slightly lower ratings. They'll be so desperate to increase their scores, they'll rate him highly right away in the hopes of getting a high score in return. 

He doesn't want to go too low, though. If the average is skewed high, what does that say of the people with lower ratings? That the person was so bad, their dates risked jeopardizing their own scores to make sure a low rating was tallied? 

So that idea's probably out. 

He keeps digging. 

After a while, he notices yet another pattern. It looks like a lot of the best-looking and highest-rated men are handing out mostly four-star ratings. 

That's interesting. It might also be a point of pride, then. If they went around giving out five star ratings to everyone, they might come across as desperate, just like Dennis had assumed. A four-star rating from someone in the top tier, then, would mean that the date went well, but not well enough to merit the highest score. That implies a certain level of expectation. A certain standard they hold for a five-star date that most people can't achieve. And yet, they usually still receive five-star scores in return, meaning they more than satisfied their end of the bargain. 

Those are the men Dennis wants. Dennis has never settled for anything less than the best. Well, he has, but only under dire circumstances. Which he's not in here. Yet. He's got this totally handled. 

New plan: Dennis will find high-rated men who typically give out four-star ratings, and he'll rely on his powers of observation and seduction to extract a rare five-star score from those men in particular. 

It's perfect. There's just enough of a risk factor to get Dennis's blood pumping. Getting really attractive men to rate him highly will take some extra effort, kind of like what he enjoys about banging women. Plus, he won't have to settle for the poorly-rated ones to make this work. That plan can be his fallback, if he needs one. 

He won't.

Dennis is so fucking ready for this. He claps his hands together and rubs them together, cracking his neck and feeling like he's shaking off the cobwebs of old Dennis. Point five star Dennis is no more. 

Now that he's dissected the system, he can narrow down the list and reel in the successes. 

Dennis finds a good fifteen or so candidates in Guy-raters and cross-checks them with Bunchers. Eight of those guys have a Bunchers profile and are looking to mingle. Of those eight, two of them are actually not that appealing, on closer inspection. Those two get eliminated as well. 

Six. Six is a good number to start with. 

Bunchers was set up for group gatherings, but it still allows direct requests for one on ones, which Dennis figured out early on, of course. He'll just need to replicate that system. One on ones will be essential with these men. Dennis has chosen top-tier specimens, and he can't afford distractions. 

He'll just rank these six in order of preference and go from there. 

Invitations for numbers one and two sent out, Dennis waits. 

In the meantime, he might need to switch up the look a little. Out of habit, he'd gotten dressed in his impress-women outfit, a sightly casual button-up that shows that even on the weekends, he dresses well. It lends the implication that his work week outfit is even dressier, which of course leads chicks to believe he has a high-power job somewhere. That way, even if they learn he works at the bar with a bunch of hooligans, the precedent has already been set. He's buried the seed of an idea, an image of himself, deep into their little pea brains. If they think poorly of Charlie and Mac and Dee and, obviously, Frank, they'll assume Dennis is the put-together one of the bunch. It's a basic rule of human psychology. First impressions are hard to break. 

He doesn't need to work that angle with men, though. Men probably won't care if he has a high-power job. Some of them might. But if they do care, they'll just want to know about his job as proof that he's not a lazy, good-for-nothing bum who might drag their reputations down. Men care about ambition, and they like seeing ambition in guys they're dating, but it'll be even more appealing to them if Dennis is a contradiction. Ambitious, but softer. Put-together, but alluring. 

He'll need an expensive-looking, soft t-shirt or sweater to accomplish that. Basically what he would be wearing if he wasn't working an angle in the first place. He likes dressing nicely, but he also likes being comfortable. 

It's strange to think that every decision Dennis makes naturally is what works well for dating men. 

Or maybe he's subconsciously manipulating the situation to make it seem like he naturally gravitates toward dating men. 

Nah, that's too meta, even for him. 

Dennis pushes back from the desk and unlocks the personal cabinet he keeps in the office. Most of the shit in this office is Frank's paperwork and relics from old schemes. Dennis couldn't care less about any of that stuff. What he does put some effort into, however, is this cabinet, which he keeps as a secondary stash of clothing and makeup for the many situations that call for a slightly different Dennis Reynolds variation. Dennis Reynolds: car salesman. Dennis Reynolds: lawyer. Dennis Reynolds: burlesque...

The types of clothing don't matter. It's everything he could think to want in the gang's many schemes. All of these outfits make him into some high-powered something or other. He feels great in all this stuff. It's a carefully curated collection, and it's a good thing he stores all of this stuff here, too, considering that he lost most of his other stuff in the Thanksgiving fire. Benefits of being a planner. Reckless, sometimes, but a planner. People don't give him nearly enough credit. Do they think he just looks perfectly coiffed all the time on a whim? 

He chooses an expensive-looking (because it was hella expensive) dark blue henley and his fitted, expertly-faded jeans and touches up his hair and face just enough to hide the fact that he hasn't had a good night's sleep in weeks. Another downside to staying at Dee's. 

Sleeping is overrated anyway. 

He finishes off with the slightest, smallest dab of cologne. Nothing is more of a turnoff than overpowering cologne on a man. He knows this for a fact. 

Then he heads back to the bar. A few patrons are arriving now, and the rest of the gang are nowhere to be found. He reluctantly serves alcohol for a couple of hours until his phone pings with a message from his Guy-raters pick number two. Brad. Brad is willing to meet tonight, in just a couple of hours. 

Let the games begin. 

Soon enough, Frank, Mac, and Charlie come back. Dennis is so very uninterested in their scheme that he stays behind the bar serving drinks just so they won't try to loop him into their conversations. They keep blowing a whistle and darting into the back office for some reason. Whatever. Not his problem any more. 

Now Dennis is all sweaty and gross from being the only one working for hours. He needs a touchup.

He waits until right after Mac, Charlie, and Frank have left the office and seem to be hooked on their group date to slip in one last time, unlocking his cabinet again to inspect his reflection in the full-length mirror. A few touch-ups here and there, and he's ready to go. 

Ten minutes until Brad gets there. Dennis grabs a few cold ones from behind the bar, ignoring all the patrons asking him for another drink - can't they see he's in the middle of something? - and scopes out his table for the night. 

He'll want to be very far away from whatever Frank, Charlie, and Mac are up to. Random whistle-blowing? Frantic conversations? Trips to and from the office, where there's now a giant whiteboard listing things like Jews, AIDS, muscles, and spiders? 

Okay, he's intrigued, but he should probably keep his date far away from that mess if he intends to make a good impression. Charlie and Mac have already proven they seriously cannot be trusted with his dates. 

It'll have to be that table in the corner. It's far from the office, and it's far from the tables in the middle of the room where those three have been conducting their group dates. The father away, the better. 

There's already a couple at the table in the corner. He asks them very nicely to move. They refuse. He yells. They leave. All is well. 

Dennis cracks open one of the beers and is talking his first sip when he notices an expectant face walking toward his table. 

"You must be Brad," he says, all charm. 

This is it. He's feeling it. Dennis Reynolds is back on his game and it feels fucking great. 

-╰⋃╯- 

Dennis wakes up only slightly hungover in a strange bed. Guy number one - well, guy number two, going by the ranking system - is gone for the day, off to his job as an investment banker or something. If Dennis were looking to settle down, he would lock this shit down, because damn. Brad? Yep. Definitely Brad. Brad's apartment is nice. Well, it's on the small side, but this bed. Maybe it's that Dennis has been spending his nights either curled into a tiny ball on a loveseat or sharing two feet of bed space for the last couple months, but he feels great. He can't remember the last time he woke up feeling this great. 

He's tempted to poke around and mess with Brad's stuff - serves him right for leaving a stranger unattended in his apartment. So he does. It's only the ping of a message from Bunchers telling him that his number one pick from Guy-raters - Aaron - is willing to meet that very evening at the bar that extracts Dennis from the jacuzzi tub, where he's been holed up for hours with a bottle of champagne watching reruns of M*A*S*H on the wall-mounted TV. It's tempting to stay anyway, but he has the ratings to think of now. 

Dennis pulls himself out of the bath, "borrows" one of Brad's nicer-looking shirts (making sure to grab his own henley on the way out - it really was an expensive one), and heads back to the bar. He left a giant mess at Brad's place, but he locked the door on his way out, which Dennis thinks he should get bonus points for. 

Apparently Brad agrees. A couple of hours later, after Dennis has prepared himself and opened the bar once again (he's doing far too much work these days), he gets an alert from Guy-raters saying he's been given five stars from his first date.

Damn right.

Brad's probably even home by now, meaning he still gave Dennis that score after seeing the detritus of Dennis hanging out in his apartment all day. Maybe Dennis is just that good. Maybe the guy gets off on providing. It's probably a little of both, based on how things went last night. Dennis read that one very well, indeed. 

Soon it's time to get ready for his date with Aaron, and - "Oh, goddammit, leave, just...go! Why are you people so attached to this table? There are dozens of empty tables in here right now..." He shooes the exact same couple away from what's now become his table in the back. 

Mac, Charlie, and Frank are nowhere to be found tonight, which is for the best. Dee is probably off giving her straight men one-star ratings, the bimbo. It's just him. Perfect. 

He goes back to the bar and sets a bunch of beers on the counter with a sign saying they're $15 each. If some fools are willing to pay that much for a Coors, he will certainly let them - mostly, though, he just needs everyone in the bar to get good and drunk so he'll look calm and collected by comparison. He swipes a few and heads back to the now-empty table. 

Aaron is late. Fucker. Who does he think he is, keeping Dennis waiting....

Oh, shit. Yeah. Dennis can definitely wait on that. 

Aaron is tall and fit and not particularly burly, but there's this air about him that piques Dennis's interest. 

Dennis can definitely see why this guy's gotten almost fifty five-star ratings. 

He also knows, based on the fact that Aaron's been on at least that many dates and received nothing but dazzling reviews, that this guy's probably more suave even than Dennis. Or he's hiding something. Probably both. 

He'll need to play this one carefully. 

Everyone has a thing. And from the looks of it, no one's cracked this guy yet. It's a tantalizing challenge. 

He cracks it. 

It's...honestly, it's a little weird even by Dennis's standards. 

It's still fun, though. And it only makes sense. You pick the best-rated person on Guy-raters, and you're bound to run into a few snags. The guy was so grateful that night after Dennis left his place, he even rated Dennis while Dennis was still in the cab on his way back to Dee's. Another perfect five. 

And that's another thing with these guys. They don't show appreciation for a good time by trying to move in with him and take all of his stuff. Instead, they're perfectly content taking Dennis back to _their_ apartments for a change. They roll out all the stops. They provide refreshments. They invite Dennis to stay and shower afterward. Which is sometimes necessary, but it's the fact that Dennis feels like he's being catered to here that makes for such a welcome change of pace. If he plays his cards right (and supposing he doesn't need to leave just to avoid the awkward morning-after-whatever-that-was conversation like he's doing with Aaron), he can even stay the night and sleep in an actual bed instead of folding himself in half to sleep on Dee's god-awful couch. 

Maybe Dennis needs to switch to men permanently. 

Why did he stop dating men again? Aside from the lack of challenge. Still, though. He's boosting his ratings _and_ he's having a good time. 

Right. He's avoiding that train of thought. There's something there, but...surely Dennis-of-old would agree that this is a pretty sweet setup. He can't think of a good reason to stop now, especially when he's already two perfect scores in. 

Spending the rest of the night on the tiny, horrible couch is incentive enough for Dennis to line up his next four picks from Guy-raters. He considers calling Brad again, but that would defeat the whole purpose of the ratings thing. Brad can't rate him twice, unless he logs out and does it anonymously. Which would be fine, but anonymous ratings don't look as good as scores clearly linked to the top-rated men on the website. 

No, he's on a roll now. As tempting as it might be to call Brad up again, he's also _really_ getting off on achieving this perfect five stars thing, not to mention the fact that he's extracting those scores from some of the hottest men in the city. He can't give up now. 

-╰⋃╯- 

Over the next several days, Dennis clocks Mac, Charlie, and Frank in his periphery. Now that he's getting somewhere with this ratings thing, he has a little more brainpower to keep an eye on them and watch from afar as they bomb date after date. It's pretty entertaining, actually. It's also an ego-booster. They were the problem all along, and this just proves it. 

Over those same few days, Dennis gets taken home by Dave, Randy, and Justin. And just like he planned, he is reeling in those five-star ratings. Dave was a little tricky, and Dennis almost didn't pull it off, but he'd thrown a hail mary at the end of the date that had paid off big-time. 

There's just one more of the initial six to go, and nothing can throw Dennis off his game. He's unstoppable. He's fucking and getting fucked, he's spending the night in luxurious beds - not entirely luxurious, even, just _beds_. He's far away from Dee's shithole apartment, and he's feeling better than he has in ages. All the while, he's got five star ratings out the ass. Screw those women. They don't deserve him. Dennis is putting forth so little effort and he's being treated like a freaking god. 

Dennis has no idea what he'll do after his final date tonight with Wade. Maybe do another search on Guy-raters, schedule some more dates, keep the streak going. Maybe he'll try his hand at Raters again, applying the new system of picking women who rate lots of dates so he won't have to ask for a rating outright. Dennis is feeling pretty confident these days, and it might be time to get to work on his other score. If it goes poorly, he has his Guy-raters fallback. 

Dennis needs to get ready for his date with Wade. He only left Justin's a while ago, wearing a shirt he'd swiped from the closet the night before, since Justin is a club DJ and would still be around the next day when Dennis left. The shirt's a little big, but it looks great on him. At this rate, he'll have a whole new closet by the time he finally gets around to finding a new apartment. 

He passes by a group of women on their way out the door, probably fleeing a group date gone wrong - probably fleeing Mac, Charlie, and Frank's group date gone wrong, come to think of it. Otherwise...huh, lately with the whole Bunchers thing, the bar's usually pretty crowded this time of day. Now it's just the gang and a handful of random dudes. What are all the dudes here for? Certainly not Dennis. He would never pull this street trash. 

He walks over to Mac and Charlie at the counter. They appear to have just dug a computer out of the back office, and now they're pulling up their Raters profiles. 

Mac pulls up his profile and immediately starts bragging about his now-two-point-five-star average. Which is...really not bad, considering. Charlie says something about how their most recent date went the farthest yet, whatever that means, because they clearly haven't banged any of these women. 

"What's up, you guys?" Dennis asks. "It's way past opening, where is everyone?" 

"Oh, yeah, you know, the crowd's kinda been thinning out," Charlie says, turning on his bar stool at Dennis's voice. "I think it's because we haven't really been tending bar." 

"Well, there's..." He's about to make a comment about all the random gross dudes in the bar, but then he sees Mac turn back to the computer and type Dennis's name into the search bar on Raters. 

"Whoa, man, you don't wanna do that..." He doesn't want them to see his less-than-one-star rating, but he also doesn't want them to see that pesky little link that's there now, not that he cares or anything, he just...

"Oooh, shit Dennis, your score is bad." Mac looks at him like he knows what this is doing to Dennis, because of course he does, but he also looks incredibly smug, and Dennis can tell he's just itching to say something about his two and a half stars. 

"Nah, it's cool man, I've got another thing goin' on." Luckily, Mac doesn't seem to have noticed the link to Guy-raters. Probably for the best. Now that he's thinking about it, he's not sure...

"Wait, where have you been sleeping? I thought you finally started hitting it off with those dates of yours and that's why you weren't at home the last few days," Mac says. Thank goodness Mac is so unobservant, because he could have literally turned around any of those nights in the bar and seen exactly what Dennis has been up to. Or maybe he's selectively observant. 

Then Charlie notices the link. Shit. "Guy-raters...what's that?" 

No problem. He can shut this down. As long as...

Mac clicks the link. 

Shit.

"Whoa, this is a neat website," Mac says, and of course he'd say that, there's half-naked men in the background. 

Charlie is reading the stupid slogan, though. "A place for the gays? What the heck?" 

Mac does a little freakout that almost knocks his chair over. "What, I wasn't..." 

No one's paying any attention, though. Dennis is watching this all unfold in slow motion, not sure how to stop it, because now that it's happening, he thinks he should probably stop it somehow...

"Hey, this is you! Oh shit, you're on this website?" Charlie points at it, looking back at Dennis over his shoulder. "Says here you're...hey, congrats man! You got your five star rating!" 

Dennis feels like he's moving and talking through sludge. "Yeah, it's not..." 

"Dennis? What...what is this?" Mac is looking at him like a confused puppy, and Dennis knows he'll take any excuse to not see what he's seeing right now. Dennis needs to say something. He needs to fix it before it gets out of hand...

"It's, ah...it's...nothing," he manages. He can't move. If he goes over and shuts down the page, it'll look more suspicious. But what...

Mac is looking at the screen again, probably looking for the explanation himself rather than wait in Dennis's. He's expanding the five-star ratings and looking at the names and pictures of everyone who's rated Dennis in the last week. Brad. Aaron. Dave. Randy. 

"Justin..? Um, there's something weird going on here, 'cause, these all kinda look like men, dude...I mean, Justin could be a girl's name, I guess...looks sorta like a guy though...Dennis, are you banging all these dude-ladies?" 

"Those are definitely men," says Charlie, and Mac frowns. 

More than anything, Dennis would love to have some convenient explanation for all this. He hesitates. 

Mac laughs, suddenly. "Oh, I get it. You got hacked. Right? You're always going on about passwords and encryption and how easy it is to steal people's information. Someone hacked into your computer and got your headshot from three years ago - " (Jesus, he remembers when Dennis got the headshot and that he only stores it on his computer) " - and they're playing a prank on you, right? There's no way you'd ever be on a...a gay website. That doesn't make any sense," he laughs uncomfortably, looking at Dennis beseechingly. 

Before Dennis can think of what to say, Charlie butts in again, pointing at the picture of Dave. "Oh man, I remember that guy, that's the one you were on a date with in the back of the bar the other night..." 

Shit, shit, shit. Why hadn't Dennis thought about Mac's reaction to all this. He hadn't been thinking. He'd been so focused on the ratings thing, on finding a solution, finally, to the madness, that he'd forgotten all about this part. 

Dee and Frank, apparently sensing that something interesting is happening, make their way over. "Did someone say gay? Is this an intervention?" Frank asks. 

"No, no no," Charlie says waving his hands. "Not an intervention. We were just checking out Dennis's profile on Guy-raters. Guy-raters," he laughs to himself. "Sounds like gyraters." 

"Dennis has a profile on Guy-raters?" Dee squints at the screen. "Hey, good job bro! The dudes really like you. Wait. Hold up. Why didn't you tell me you're bi?" 

"Buy? Who's buying?" Frank chimes in. 

"Bi," Charlie says, extending Dennis's ongoing nightmare. "It means bisexual, ah, into both genders." 

"Dennis is gay?" Frank sputters. "We already have one of those!" 

"No no," Dee corrects him. "Gay and bi are two different things." 

"Yeah, gay means you just wanna have sex with the same gender. Bi means you're up for whatever. Or I guess that's pan. There's a lot to keep track of," Charlie says. 

"Fucking queers!" Frank sputters. "I'm surrounded by fucking queers! One wasn't enough? And my own son to boot? Oh, I should've known, I..." 

"Whoa whoa whoa, I'm gonna stop you right there, buddy, before you say anything you might regret, okay?" Charlie puts a hand on Frank's shoulder. 

Dee's still frowning at him like he's offended her personally. "I guess this makes a lot of sense, but I'm your sister, Dennis, I should know these things..." 

"I mean, I think it's more important that Dennis is comfortable with all this, maybe he didn't want to make a big deal out of it..." Charlie counters.

All of this is happening in the background, and Dennis is paying attention to it, but at the moment he can't rip his attention away from Mac, who's slowly looking from the computer screen to Dennis to Frank to Dee and back to Dennis with a blank expression on his face. 

Mac is an expert at ignoring these things, but it's probably getting hard to overlook the mounting evidence - the website, the fact that Charlie saw Dennis on a date, all those words like queer and bi and gay that are probably sounding off all the alarms in Mac's head right now. 

"Dennis? They're wrong, right? You got hacked." 

The gang quiets down and now everyone's looking at Dennis. 

He wants to say something, has to say something. This is his chance. If he agrees, makes up some quick lie about how his computer got stolen and the guy had a grudge and talks about how he did, indeed, have to meet with that guy Charlie saw him with to try and get it back, this will all just go away. Dee might say his laptop is in her apartment, not stolen, but no one listens to Dee anyway, and Dennis will say, _of course it's in the apartment, Dee, I got it back_ , and he'll scoff at her stupidity and everyone will laugh and Mac will back him up and everything will go back to the way it was. This whole conversation will be over with. And then Dennis will have to stop banging those guys, because he won't be able to explain away any further ratings after this. And he'll have to hope everyone assumes all those other guys' profiles were hacked, too, because getting ratings from the top five men on Guy-raters is a tough prank to pull off. But Dee and Charlie and Mac are all idiots. They probably won't even notice. And then once everything's back to normal, he'll have to go back to being sneaky about the porn he watches and go back to enthusiastically banging women, which is fine, he's been doing that for years. Banging women was his decision all that time. He's certainly not one to deny himself the pleasures in life. If he wanted men, he would have gone for it. But...things feel different now, maybe better, and Dennis just...he just can't. If he agrees with Mac, it's like he's saying the worst prank someone can pull on him is to make him look gay. And Dennis has never been into that kind of self-hatred. That's Mac's gig. He's usually okay with lying, though, and he's not sure which one wins out here. 

The moment drags on with no reply from Dennis to clear it all up, and Dennis sees the exact moment that Mac's eyes light up with realization. The gang, sensing that they were right all along, starts bickering again. Frank is rambling about _fucking fairies_ , and Dee and Charlie are going back and forth debating something, occasionally snapping at Frank to shut up, and they're all being assholes, but Dennis can't deal with that right now, because he can't stop seeing the way Mac is looking at him now. 

In high school, they weren't particularly close. Dennis made a few overtures, and they'd started to hang out a little, and then Mac had caught Dennis making out with a guy behind the bleachers. Dennis had thought it'd be no big deal - Mac and Charlie both seemed pretty accepting of whatever - but Mac had tried to _save_ him. He'd gone on and on about Christ and hell and the threat of eternal damnation. He'd been so upset about the whole thing, and he'd made Dennis promise to change his ways if he ever wanted to hang out with them. Mac was fun and interesting, and he could be dumb as shit sometimes, but he was solid. Reliable. Something Dennis was self-aware enough to realize he'd been lacking in his life. So Dennis had agreed. They'd buried it under the rug and forgotten about it. Mac had probably written the whole thing off as a fluke, over the years, if he even thought about it at all. Dennis fucked women all the time. Dennis was very overt in his attraction to women. That made it okay. 

Years later, Dennis became Mac's guru for dating women. He encouraged it. It was like Mac needed Dennis to date lots and lots of women. Maybe because it made everything else they did together less if an issue. And that was fine with Dennis. It was fun. Back in high school, though, this gay paranoia had driven them apart. Dennis had stopped hanging around Mac, unhappy with the whole situation for reasons he couldn't quite understand. He'd left for college, and he'd fucked his way through basically the entire gay population in his undergrad. 

He'd been missing something with all those guys, though, so he'd switched back to women in vet school. Pretty soon he realized he needed to start capitalizing on the world's best pickup line for chicks. Women loved a guy who took care of animals. It demonstrated value. And thus the system was born. 

It had all fallen into place when the opportunity for the bar opened up and Mac and Charlie had suddenly been around all the time. By that point he'd decided banging guys was overrated, and he'd switched back to women almost exclusively. When Mac had moved in, bringing with him his extensive and creepy-as-shit collection of religious paraphernalia, it had seemed even more necessary to actively fuck women. He wanted it. Craved it, even. Craved the challenge - it helped him let off steam. He was always on edge. Always had been. Sex was his release, and it gave him something to focus all of his extra energy on. 

Now that he's back to fucking guys, though, he thinks it might be better than he remembered. He likes it. 

Dennis has a decision to make. 

He still has the chance to lie and stuff this all back in the box - the box of stuff he and Mac firmly _do not talk about_ \- or he can leave this out in the open. 

Box. He wants the box. Shit. 

"Mac," he says, holding his hands up like he's facing down a wild beast. "Listen to me, this is all bullshit." He laughs. "Right? I think we can agree this is all bullshit." 

"Yeah, Dennis, it is," Mac says, and he's slowly backing away from Dennis, but not like he wants to get away from Dennis, more like he can't believe it's come to this. Like Dennis is a lost cause and he's already given up. Already moved on. 

Dennis had thought, all those years ago, that hearing Mac go on and on about how Dennis was sinning and going to hell was the worst reaction he could imagine about this from Mac. He'd thought all these years he'd been banging women, he'd been avoiding having all Mac's self-hatred and vitriol turned on him. 

This, though. This is worse.

Dennis hadn't planned for this. 

Dennis was always the planner, and he hadn't planned for this. 

"Mac, c'mon," he says. "Really? Is this really what you're going with? You're just gonna walk away?" He knows he sounds desperate at this point, and he can't help it. 

He walks right up to Mac and shoves him. 

A reaction. Anything. He'll take anything right now. Because he knows what's happening in Mac's idiotic brain. He saw Dennis hesitate, saw the truth in his hesitation, and now the delicate web of lies he's constructed justifying their relationship over the years is all falling apart, and Dennis can't do anything to stop it, and he just needs Mac to fucking react. 

There's nothing. Mac's giving up. 

"Well guess what," Dennis spits. "You're walking away from me? Nah. I'm walking away from you, pal." He's about ten inches from Mac's noise, jabbing him in the chest with his finger. "You don't get to walk away from me." 

Dennis sees Mac's nose flare in disgust, sees Mac bat his hand away and stumble backward, like he can't stand to be touched by Dennis. He backs away so far he's backed right out of the bar. 

"Oh, shit, oh I'm sorry, is that a problem for you? Is that a problem for you, asshole?" Dennis pushes through the closing door and follows Mac out into the late evening sun. "Worried the sins of the flesh might just rub off on you?" He pushes Mac harder, and Mac stumbles again this time falls backward onto the sidewalk. A couple people who were walking by jump to the side and give them a wide berth. 

The fall finally does it. Mac's shell of indifference is cracking. 

Dennis cackles as Mac comes rushing back toward him, fists raised, and socks Dennis in the eye. The pain radiates like a sunburst in his skull. Mac hits him again, splitting Dennis's lip. He can taste the blood between his teeth. Dennis ducks the third punch, barreling forward to seize Mac around the middle. But he's pulled away by Dee's massive man hands and surprising strength. Charlie, meanwhile, is tugging at Mac. 

"Hey! Hey! Break it up!" Charlie is yelling. 

"Aw, man, I was ready to put bets on that fight," Frank is saying. 

Dennis tries to get away, but Dee is a strong one for her size. He stops fighting, holding his hands up so she sees he's backing off. 

Mac is staring at him. It's all down to this. What Mac says in these next moments will...

"Stay the fuck away from me." He's looking at Dennis with cold hatred in his eyes. He pushes Charlie away roughly and walks off. 

The next few hours are a blur. Dennis faintly registers Charlie draping one of Dennis's arms over his shoulder and leading him back into the bar and into the bathroom, even though Dennis is perfectly capable of walking on his own. Registers Dee and Charlie barring Frank from the bathroom because Frank keeps making inappropriate comments. Knows Dee and Charlie are bickering and trying to figure out whether he's broken anything in his face and whether they should take him to the hospital. Knows they dunk his face in cold water and make him gargle and spit to get the blood out of his mouth, and then he's sitting on a chair that he doesn't remember being there before. At one point, Charlie disappears and Frank comes back in, and Dee gets sidetracked trying to corral Frank back out of the bathroom. Then Charlie comes in with a dirty bar rag tied around some ice. He presses it to Dennis's eye and it's the first thing Dennis has felt in the last...however long it's been since they dragged him in here. 

Eventually, they leave, and Dennis sits in the bathroom with the dirty ice rag on his face until his eye socket is numb and the ice melts to nothing. 

He's staring at the rag in his hand when Dee and Charlie come back into the bathroom. 

There are people out there. Not their rowdy Bunchers crowd, but the usual number of patrons, jostling beer bottles and drunkenly grumbling at one another. 

"Hey, man," Charlie says, and he sounds way too chipper. "Brought you a beer." 

Dennis takes it. "Thanks." He hisses when taking a swig reopens the split lip. He uses the bar towel to stop the bleeding. 

"Oh, man, I wouldn't...okay. That works," Charlie says. 

"Heeey, Den," Dee says, crouching down slightly by him. "We just wanted to apologize..." 

"Yeah, man, we had no idea Mac would go all crazy like that..." Charlie says. 

Dennis scoffs. "Yeah. Me neither." 

"Yeah, that was kinda crazy, right? That was kinda darker than a lot of the stuff that we usually get up to around here..." 

"Yeah," Dee says, sucking in a breath through her teeth. "Oof. That was a tough one. You okay there, buddy?" 

Is Dennis okay? Sure. Dennis is great. Dennis is numb. Like his face. Like his stupid frozen face. He laughs a little at that. It sounds hysterical out loud. 

Dee winces, shooting a sideways glance at Charlie. 

The two of them must have blocked the door with something, because there's a crashing noise followed by Frank coming in. 

"Oh, get out of here old man," Dee says, crowding him toward the door. 

"No. I have something to say to Dennis." He turns to Dennis. "I didn't know you were queer. It..." he shrugs a little. "Honestly, like Dee said, it makes sense, I guess." He holds his hands up as Dee and Charlie start crowding him again. Dennis must really be in bad shape if those assholes are trying to protect him from Frank of all people. 

"Whoa whoa wait, I'm not done." Frank stares beseechingly at Dee then turns back to Dennis. 

"Obviously I'm not thrilled about it," he flinches and then glowers when Dee and Charlie round on him, but he keeps going. "But what he did is not right. And I love Mac like he's my own kid, but he's got some shit to work through, you know, and that makes him a not so nice person sometimes, and I can forgive that, but you say the word, Dennis, and he's out." 

Charlie rears back. "Whoa, he's out? Like out of our lives? You can't just..." 

"No, Charlie," Frank says, exasperated. "Out of the bar. I still own the majority share, and I can have his shares revoked. I ain't gonna stop talking to 'im or anything like that, so don't get your hopes up, but I, y'know, I figured it might make things difficult for you an' him to be co-owners with me now. He doesn't have to have a say here any more if you don't want him to. He can just be in the background. He's kind of an idiot anyway." Frank shrugs. "Whaddaya say?" 

There's a beat of silence, and then Dee and Charlie are both talking at the same time. "Wow, Frank - " " - Holy shit, dude - " "I'm surprised this is coming from _you_ \- " " - that's really big of you man, I'm proud of you - "

It really is, too. They are doing all sorts of out of the box shit these days. Dennis is...he's still a little removed him everything, but he's oddly touched that Frank would offer this. 

Hell, he probably won't go through with it, not really. Even if Dennis agrees, it's more likely they'll end up with Charlie owning two thirds of the shares because Frank is feeling magnanimous after his big gesture. And then Frank will realize he's fucked up and he needs Dennis and...Dennis and Mac, usually...to help fix it...maybe because Mac is out of the picture for now - is he? Does Dennis know where he stands with Mac? - Frank will probably have to get Dee involved in Mac's stead, and the bar will turn into a strip club or a biker gang bar or something and Dennis will have to loop Mac in anyway, because he always works best when he's got Mac there to back him up, and...shit. Shit. Did he just fuck everything up? What if Mac never talks to him again, and...

"Oookay, you're kinda scaring me there, buddy," he hears Dee say, and what is this? Dennis is the one who takes charge in these situations, none of them have any idea what they're doing...

That, more than anything, finally snaps him out of it. 

"Yeah, no, I'm fine, Dee, back off, jeez. Can a guy get...get a little breathing room, it's..."

"Yeah man except you're kinda crying I think?" Charlie is saying.

Well, would you look at that. "Crying?" Dennis laughs, scrubbing his face. He was definitely crying. Frank is back to muttering insults again. He has to get this back on track. "I'm, I dunno what you're seeing man, that's definitely not happening." 

"No, it's definitely happening," Dee says. 

Oh, fuck off, he thinks. "Uh. No, I'm not. _It's_ not. Happening. Doesn't matter." He jumps up from his seat, tosses the dirty bar rag into a sink, and...

"Goddammit Charlie, is that your rat stick cleaner? That you use to clean all the dead rats off your..." 

"Man, I tried to warn you, but..." 

"Do we not have any other rags in the...you know what, it doesn't even matter." He shudders. That went in his split lip, and now he's probably got some sort of rat disease...Jesus. These people cannot be left unsupervised for ten seconds. 

"Look, I'm gonna...Dee, Charlie, I wanna thank you for getting me back on track, there, and Frank, thank you for, uh, not being a complete asshole, I guess, and I appreciate the offer, but we'll work this out. We'll work everything out. There's no need to rush off and do something rash like turn this into a biker gang bar..." 

"What? No one said anything about a biker gang bar," Dee says. 

Dennis laughs, "No one said anything about a biker gang bar, that's, that's crazy talk, Dee, it's just, you know, one thing tends to lead to another in these kinds of situations, and, either way the point is, no, Mac can keep his shares...no need to do anything...crazy..." 

"Biker gang bar," Charlie says, tapping his chin in thought. "That's not a bad idea actually..." 

"Oh goddammit, see what I mean?" Dennis gestures at Charlie, but who's he talking to? Mac's the only one that ever listens...

"What, you're the one that said..." Charlie hedges. 

"I know what I said, alright, Jesus Christ, you people..." 

Frank is looking relieved, saying, "Oh, thank fuck. You don't wanna revoke the shares? Thank fuck. That would have been a lot of fucking paperwork. Alright, I'm out. See you queers later." 

"Queers? Who's he talking to?" Dee says. "Does he...does he think we're all gay now?" 

"Nah, he's just...I'll have a talk with him later, it'll be alright," Charlie says. "Now about this biker gang thing..." 

They're making the bar into a biker gang hangout. 

Goddammit. 

Dennis wants no part in this, but Dee and Charlie start talking about getting tattoos and talking Frank into buying them both motorcycles and debating whether they need to kill anyone to get initiated, and it's just safer for everyone if Dennis gets involved now, early on, when some of the damage can be prevented. He feels a little responsible for this, honestly. If he'd been in his right mind, he'd have never even mentioned it, he should have known they'd...

Wait a minute, though, if they...huh. Yeah, maybe this wasn't such a bad idea after all. This could work. 

"Alright," he says, interrupting whatever they're in the middle of debating, "here's what we're gonna do." He's got them hooked, of course - they were probably debating getting tattoos of crows or some shit and starting their own biker gang, and Dee was probably objecting because she doesn't want a bird tattoo, for obvious reasons (because she looks like a bird), and they were just going nowhere fast, but now they're waiting to hear what Dennis has to say. He leads them back into the bar and far, far away from the rat towel, and Dennis really needs to bathe at some point, and maybe check his vaccination records. Jesus.

One hitch, though - when they walk back into the bar, Wade is there. Has been there for...probably a while now. How long has it been since Mac left? Because that was maybe...45 minutes before his date was supposed to start? He doesn't have his phone, and...maybe they should keep a clock in the bar. 

Wade gets up from the table and walks over to Dennis, and fucking hell. He is gorgeous. Goddamn. 

Dennis would love nothing more than to get right on that, but... "Hey, man, you must be Wade. Listen. It's been kinda a rough night, can we reschedule?" 

Wade looks a little pissed - he's probably been here a while, then - but then he sees Dennis's probably mascara-run face and his black eye and his split lip and probably also the way Charlie and Dee are hovering like he's about to fall to pieces and Wade is a class act about it, he really is. He doesn't overreact like Dennis would. He gives Dennis the benefit of the doubt and even manages to look a little concerned, and that...Dennis wants to fall right into that, right now, that sounds...so tempting, but he knows himself, and that would be a bad idea at the moment. Dennis is wrung out and he has some shit of his own to sort through. They reschedule for the next week, and Dennis refuses when Wade tries to pay for his beer, which is drained, and he looks like a sipper rather than a chugger, so he probably did manage to hang out for a while and is still being super nice about it. Dennis was planning to wait a couple days and then cancel, but he might just see this one through after all. 

After he walks Wade out, Dennis is...spent. He is all out of energy. But then Dee and Charlie grab him a beer and pat him on the back and don't talk until he brings up the biker gang thing again, and he kind of loves them for that, if he's even capable of that emotion. He's appreciative, chalk it up to that. 

Dee and Charlie are really hamming it up, now that the biker gang thing is on the table. They're a little over the top with it, definitely overcompensating, honestly, but pretty soon they all fall back into their usual rhythm. By the time they close the bar that night and Dennis drives back to Dee's place to sleep on the itty bitty couch, he's too busy thinking about their new mafia don angle to think about anything else. Because obviously, if there's a biker gang in town, their greatest criminal empire threat would be the Philadelphia/New Jersey mob, they already kind of have an in with those guys. They just need to infiltrate the mob and stir up some trouble for the bikers, so they can swoop in and fix everything, thereby getting an in with the biker gang. When Dennis at the helm, there's no way they'll fail.

-╰⋃╯- 

It goes smoothly, right up until the point it doesn't. Then they have to call Frank to bail them out of jail, and since Frank is in the middle of something (supposedly) and can't make it, they have to call Mac. Dee has to talk to Mac on the phone and relay what Dennis wants her to say because Dennis is pretty sure Mac won't talk to him. Dee fucks it up, of course, but Mac understands Dennis's relayed code words anyway. Then Mac is there with the money Dennis knew Frank kept hidden behind the baseboard for emergencies, and sure enough, Mac isn't talking to Dennis - is resolutely ignoring him, actually - but he's there. He's there, and that's something.

Normally at this point, they would all drop the scheme and move on. Getting themselves on the mafia hit list (again) and being forced to do cleanup work for the biker gang they found, who aren't actually criminals but are genuinely frightening and have intimidated them into...well, the details don't matter. The point is, they would normally call it quits right about now if things were back to normal. But they aren't. Everything is weird now. Even Mac is being weird, like he wants to hang out with them but he isn't ready to give up the silent treatment. He's even doing this thing where every time someone says Dennis's name he says, _who?_ and so they all start calling Dennis different names, which confuses the situation even more. This can't go on for long. 

Somehow, beyond all reason, they keep going. They all realize, Dennis thinks, that if they stop, they have to deal with this, and none of them want that. 

So Dee and Charlie work out a system for passing information between Dennis and Mac, because Dennis is listening when Mac talks but Mac refuses to acknowledge him at all. It's close enough, and with everyone putting in the effort, it seems like it might work.

And apparently they just need to stop giving up when they hit a rough patch on a scheme, because it actually does work. They don't earn the trust of the biker gang, thereby getting the biker gang to frequent their bar, but they do manage to infiltrate the mob and get their names off the hit list, which quickly became top priority after it was made clear that the biker gang wasn't interested. Dee and Charlie still end up with tattoos, somehow, and Mac ends up being the one to save the day, so it's pretty lucky they got him involved after all. To announce that he saved the day, he rides a motorcycle into the bar, knocking the front doors to the bar off and breaking a few tables along the way, and Dennis has no idea where that came from because he thought they gave up the biker angle a long time ago, and Mac wasn't even involved back then. 

Nonetheless, they all cheers their relative success in the now open-air bar, and no one comments on the fact that Mac intentionally clinks everyone's bottle but Dennis's, and it's fine. 

A few days go by, and Dennis goes back and forth on whether to keep his date with Wade. Then, one afternoon in Dee's apartment, things between Dennis and Mac come to a head. They're not fighting about what they're actually fighting about, but then Mac makes some comment about Dennis's _lifestyle_ , and Dennis can't. His date with Wade is that night, and he calls Wade and asks if they can move it to a different place. The bar is out. 

Dennis comes by the bar less and less over the next few weeks. He's going on more dates now, and it's not exactly healthy. He knows that. But at least he can pretend it's still all part of the rating system thing, because he's getting five star ratings almost every day now from men and women alike. He's even let up on the D.E.N.N.I.S. system a little, because if he follows the system, he'll need to leave in the middle of the night, and he mostly just wants to take advantage of the free overnight. Not that he's avoiding Dee's apartment, it's just...yeah, he's totally avoiding Dee's apartment. Not because Mac's there, though. Because of the uncomfortable bed situation. Nothing else to it. 

Eventually he gets a little burnt out on the sex-every-night thing, though, which is a weird feeling and not one Dennis ever expected of himself. He supposes he needs to recuperate so he'll keep bringing his A-game and earning those high scores. So he pulls Frank aside one day and asks for enough money for a deposit on a one-bedroom apartment near the bar. Frank, probably relieved to help get him out of the apartment with Mac, the old bigot, agrees. 

Well. You take what you can get. 

After many a date, Dennis does have quite the collection of stuff now. He's made a point to take at least one thing from everyone he's spent the night with, which is a lot of people. His collection includes a bunch of new guys shirts, a couple new articles of women's clothing, a few mismatched towels, and even a mattress. That was a fun one. 

He's also spending the night at Brad's place more often than not, because the sex thing was getting old, but staying alone in his new apartment is worse. 

He runs a few schemes with the gang, but Frank is mostly avoiding them all now and Dee and Charlie eventually get tired of playing go-between or hiding out while Dennis and Mac fight over nothing. 

Dennis actually has a little cash, now, because he's spending more and more of his time actually tending bar. It drives Mac crazy when he turns on the charm, too, so he's been working their patrons and earning tips like his life depends on it. 

The gang starts fracturing off and doing side schemes in groups of two, and one of Dennis's with Charlie involves Dennis getting dressed up as a UFC fighter to help market Charlie's new energy bars, so of course he goes around topless and makes a huge deal out of it just to rile Mac up even more. 

He's even settling into a new routine. He spends all his time at Brad's place getting pampered or at the bar tormenting Mac without actually talking to him. Everything's going great. 

Then Dee comes to him with an idea for a new scheme. It's awful. Truly awful. He tells her this. She convinces him to meet her guy anyway, so he goes to the designated place at the designated time and...it's goddamn Mac. 

He turns around to leave. 

Charlie is there. He runs around to the door, because somehow they've managed to set up this meeting in a safety deposit box room in a bank, and he closes the gate and locks them in. It's the early afternoon on a Saturday, so they must have found a way to get the keys from the banker (...they probably drugged a banker, there's probably a banker passed out in the basement at the bar). Dee assures them it's only for the night and that they'll be back in the morning. But Dennis is pretty sure if they leave right now they'll lock themselves out of the bank and he'll be here with Mac until Monday morning. So he calmly reasons with them and when that doesn't work, he shouts insults at them, trying to get them to realize how bad of a plan this is. 

They leave. 

Dennis is pissed. Mac clearly isn't ready to talk to him about this yet, and Dennis is done pretending to feed Mac's self-delusions, and this is the last place Dennis wants to be right now. Their cell phones aren't working, they can't get into any of the safety deposit boxes in here (which is unfortunate, because that might actually make this whole thing worthwhile), and they try everything they can on the gate and can't get out. It makes for a long night of sporadic bickering followed by sullen silences. Mac manages to fall asleep, and Dennis is almost lulled to sleep by the sound of his rackety snoring a few times. For the most part, though, he checks his phone for a signal and stares at the gate and fumes. 

At least Dee and Charlie didn't shut the outer door of the safe. If they had, he and Mac would be practically out of air by now, especially with the way Mac is snoring to beat the band. 

Either Dee and Charlie lock themselves out of the bank or they forget to come back, because no one's there in the morning to let them out. 

Goddammit.

He and Mac share an interest in cleanliness in their living spaces in common - that is to say, they never had piss buckets like Charlie and Frank do - but dire circumstances and all that. Luckily, there's a plant in the corner, and the smell isn't too bad when they use the plant in the morning, unable to wait any longer. 

Dennis is pretty sure they're going to have to wait until Monday, but on Sunday evening, the cops pull up outside. The banker, turns out, had escaped when the gang forgot about him entirely, and he'd reported the stolen keys. Dennis has never been happier to see a police badge in his life. 

He and Mac do the respectable thing and don't tattle on their friends, even though Dennis is sorely tempted. They get interviewed by a news crew, and Dennis can't resist getting in a few digs the gang will understand without outing them as the kidnappers. He hopes they're watching. He's going to hold this over them forever. 

He and Mac aren't back to normal after that, but they seem to reach a steady impasse. The gang, mollified by their failed attempt to force Dennis and Mac to talk it out, leave well enough alone for a while. 

He's spending more time than ever at Brad's these days. Brad must know he's being used, but he doesn't seem to mind. In fact, one day, he asks Dennis to move in. Dennis seriously considers it. He's wasting money on an empty apartment that, apart from holding all the stuff Dennis had been keeping in storage, has one bare mattress and a bunch of stolen shirts. He certainly lords the invite over the gang at the bar that night just to gauge Mac's reaction. Mac is surprisingly supportive. Dennis hates it. He breaks it off with Brad that night. 

He takes Frank shopping with him for sheets and furniture, mostly so Frank can buy everything for him. Dennis has money now, but he's not paying for anything he doesn't have to. 

Then, one night, Mac shows up at his door. He's got a movie and a case of beer and some popcorn. It's the same night as their old monthly Gugino's dinner. Dennis tries not to read into it. 

Mac is clearly loathe to talk about any of this, but at the end of Transporter 3 he haltingly tells Dennis he's not comfortable with the lifestyle Dennis has chosen for himself, but he misses hanging out. Dee's been horrible, of course, and Charlie and Frank have their weird thing going on, and he just wants to hang out, that's all. 

This is another breakpoint for Dennis. He can either accept that Mac has decided to be friends with him anyway, despite the fact that he's unhappy with Dennis's "lifestyle," or he can stand his ground and maybe even have _that_ conversation - the one where he pulls everything out into the open. 

Fuck that.

"Yeah, sure, man, let's hang out," he says, and Mac looks relieved. Dennis is relieved, too, come to think of it. 

-╰⋃╯- 

They start hanging out again. Instead of Dennis spending all of his free time at Brad's place, Mac spends all of his free time at Dennis's place, only leaving when it's time to sleep, because of course, he can't spend the night in Dennis's apartment knowing what he knows about Dennis's _lifestyle_. 

So they're back to dancing around this thing again, only without the stuff Mac probably thinks is super gay, now, because it was. 

The gang is thrilled. Dennis and Mac are finally talking again, and apart from odd moments where Mac will shrug off a side hug or stand too far away from Dennis when they're talking, everything's great. 

Until it isn't. 

They're all drinking one night, somehow involved in a drinking contest scheme that brought all the college kids nearby into the bar but resulted in the gang having to drink...well, it's a _lot_ of beer. Fuck knows they're never one to give up a challenge, though, even when they've been cornered into drinking against probably 25 college kids and are losing very badly. 

Dennis is very drunk, and at some point one of the college kids - a grad student named Brent - had challenged Dennis to take off his shirt, so Dennis had compiled. Mac, for no reason, had taken his shirt off, too, and then the whole gang, thinking it was part of the game, had started stripping, too. Dennis lost some time after that, but the next thing he remembers is being pushed into the wall in the alleyway as Brent chased his mouth with cigarette-flavored lips. Dennis is cold - it's cold out here, maybe that's just because he's shirtless - but Brent's shirt is open, too, and if Dennis pulls the two open sides of his shirt, it's nothing but warm, smooth skin on his, and Dennis moans and licks into Brent's warm, velvety mouth, his teeth clicking into other teeth as Brent releases a smoky breath into his mouth. Dennis inhales. 

"Fuck, that's hot," Brent is saying. "You're pretty hot, for an older guy. Had my eye on you since I got here. Mmmmfuck," he grits out, because Dennis is not an older guy, and he needs to teach this twenty-something a lesson. He loosens his grip on the guy's dick after a minute, and the guy looks at him with an apologetic eye. "Alright, alright, you didn't like that, huh. My bad." He pushes in again, nosing up and down Dennis's neck. "However will I make it up to you?" 

And Dennis is disappointed in himself, he shouldn't let it go that easily but Brent is so strong for his size, and he's practically holding Dennis up, doing amazing things with his mouth, and Dennis is very, very drunk and very quickly forgets what he was even mad about in the first place. 

"Mmm, you like that, huh?" Brent is saying, and of course Dennis likes it, everyone likes having their dick touched, except women, or well...dickless people. 

This, though...this is amazing, even as far as dick-touching usually goes. Dennis feels a little gross for doing this in the alley, but he's so buzzed, everything seems like a good idea right now. Somehow, this guy Brent has figured out that Dennis likes it a little rougher - he's pinching Dennis's dick on the head with every upstroke, and Dennis is shaking. He thinks Brent is saying something about going back to his place, and Dennis is so very interested in doing that. He's been on a sex hiatus with all that he's been hanging out with Mac lately and he desperately wants - needs - to get laid...

Then there's a whoosh of cold air and Brent is gone, and Mac is standing over the guy, fists raised. 

What the fuck. 

What the...

Goddammit. 

Now? He's gonna do this now? 

Dennis buttons the top button on his jeans and shoves Mac aside, angry beyond belief. 

"Hey, man! Watch it!" Mac says. 

"Uh..." The college kid is looking back and forth between them. "Look, I don't want any trouble here..." 

"Then you'd better get the fuck out of here!" Mac says. 

The college kid may be a grad student, but he's still young enough, and probably smart enough, that he wants no part of Mac doing...whatever he thinks he's doing here. Dennis is so beyond pissed right now. He notices Brent going back inside, muttering something about crazy old dudes, and he can't even process that right now because _what the fuck_. 

He paces for a second to calm down, and because his adrenaline is kicking in and he needs to move or he's going to hit something. 

He rounds on Mac. "What the fuck, dude?" 

"What, I was saving you from that guy!" 

Dennis is dumbstruck for a moment. "Saving me? Fucking _saving me_? You know what, I can't do this." He turns around and heads back to the door, but Mac stops him, running around and putting a hand on Dennis's bare chest. 

He actually looks contrite. "Look, I'm sorry, man, I came out and saw you out here and..." 

"You followed me out here is more like," Dennis scoffs. "What the fuck are you doing out here, Mac?" 

"I was...I was..." 

Dennis raises his eyebrows expectantly, hands on his hips. 

"Fuck, okay, I followed you out here. But it's only because I saw the way that guy was looking at you all night! I was worried, okay?" 

"Mac, I am a goddamn adult, I do not need you _looking out for me_..." 

"Fuck. I know." 

Dennis might be hallucinating, but he's pretty sure Mac just looked right at his lips. No, he's not hallucinating. Mac's eyes are flickering around at his bare torso, and he's licking his lips and moving closer...

Dennis gets his hands on Mac's shoulders and pushes him back to arm's length. Mac looks at him contritely again. 

"You gotta stop this, Mac, this is...this is not what you want, and I think we both know that." 

"Yeah, I know, but...maybe I do?" Mac says. Shit. He must be really drunk. Dennis is far too wasted to be the adult here. Because he's still a little turned on, and Mac is looking at him like...

"Dennis, I've been meaning to talk to you about this, actually, I just...haven't gotten the nerve." 

"Talk to me about what, Mac?" 

"I think...I think I might be gay." 

Dennis stares. 

"I mean, I know it's hard to believe..." Mac continues when Dennis says nothing.

"No. Nope. Not hard to believe at all." 

"Really? Cause I thought..." 

"Oh, goddammit, what are you saying, Mac? You want...what?" 

"I think I'm gay, and I think..." He swallows. "I've been talking to Charlie about it and, I think I might be like...in love with you or something?" 

What. The. Fuck. 

"Mac. Listen to me. You are not in love with me." 

"No but I think I am though. Like I think I have been for a while. And the whole...finding out you were banging all those guys...that really threw me, you know? But then I started thinking that maybe I was actually jealous of all those guys? And I wanted to be with you instead of them?" 

Dennis is...he has nothing for this. 

"Den, I think...I think we'd be really good together..." He's got a hand on Dennis's side, and it feels too gentle, and... Sure, Dennis has fantasized about fucking Mac a few (thousand) times, but love? This is _not_ what he wants. He doesn't have stuff like this in his life. Doesn't know what he'd do with something like this. He strings as many people along as possible and eventually, they realize he's too crazy to actually stick around for, if he hasn't already pushed them away. It's not sad, or anything. It's the way things are. And Mac? This was completely out of the blue. He and Mac are too solid as friends to be talking about shit like this. Mac knows everything about him, and they balance each other out in the best and worst ways, and he should have planned for this too, goddammit. Mac is always, always the one thing he doesn't plan for. Maybe if he'd been picking up the signs, he'd have realized Mac was having this big epiphany...

"No. This is wrong," he says, backing away from Mac. This doesn't compute with what he knows about Mac. He hasn't been picking up those signs that Mac is changing his mind about everything, and maybe Mac's been subtle about it...he does tend to get an idea in his head and stubbornly make significant life changes, like that time he got super fat for no reason, and maybe this is like that, but Dennis can't be sure, and until then...

"Yeah," Mac is saying. "I used to feel that way, too, but..." 

"No, Mac, you're not hearing me. This?" He gestures between them. "This is never going to happen. Leave it the fuck alone." 

He pushes past Mac and breezes through the bar, grabbing his jacket on the way out because his shirt - Justin's shirt, actually - is missing. He hails a cab and goes back to his apartment alone and has a few more drinks before passing out on his couch, which is much larger and much more comfortable than Dee's (Dee could learn a lesson or two about furniture shopping from him, goddammit). The last thought before he falls asleep is that tonight never happened. He just needs to forget it. And then he forgets what he was supposed to be forgetting, and he supposes that was the plan all along. 

-╰⋃╯- 

The next day, he wakes up to a splitting headache and someone banging on his door. He rolls over, pulls one of the couch pillows over his face, and falls back asleep. Some indeterminate amount of time later, the knocking resumes. 

"Dennis, I know you're in there! Open up!" 

It's fucking Mac, Jesus, what the hell is he doing here so early? Dennis rolls over and checks his phone. It's...2:00 in the afternoon. Shit. 

"Dennis! Wake up, buddy!" 

Oh, fuck, how did he know Dennis would be sleeping? 

Dennis rolls back over on the couch again. 

The knocking starts again. Fuck. 

He gets up. For some reason, he's wearing just jeans and an unzipped jacket. Whatever. It's just Mac. 

He opens the door, and Mac has...flowers? 

Dennis sighs. "What...what are you up to today, did you rob a flower store? Because that is the most boring shit..." 

"No, I bought them!" Mac says, looking oddly proud for some reason. 

"Well...good for you? They probably ripped you off, though. Look, whatever it is you're up to, I'm out. I feel like shit. My head is pounding..." 

"Oh...oh, man, I'm sorry. Do you...do you want me to get you anything?" Mac says. 

"What the fuck? No, just...why are you being all weird?" Dennis leaves the door open, because he doesn't have the energy, and he really does feel like shit. He digs through one of the kitchen cabinets for the good pills, downing a few with the rest of one of the beers he'd opened the night before, and then he leans over the sink for a minute and breathes when he feels like it might all come right back up. Maybe he should drink some water. 

"Here, you should have water if you feel that bad..." Mac is suddenly there, and Dennis reluctantly takes the water from him. 

"Thanks, man." 

"Don't mention it." 

"...This tastes like...where did this water come from, Mac? I didn't actually hear you turn the faucet on..." 

"Pfft, nah, it's just flower water though, if anything that seems healthier than regular water..." He's holding the flowers in one hand, now dripping on the floor, and the empty vase is on the counter.

"Healthier than...Christ. I do not have the energy to explain this right now. What do you want?" He dumps the glass of flower water out and yanks the vase out of Mac's hand, because dahlias need lots of water, he can't just dump it out...Dennis probably swallowed some fertilizer in there too, Jesus. Well, either way, it won't feel much different than the hangover, really. 

"Do you, ah...do you remember anything about last night?" Mac says. Dennis shoves the refilled vase of dahlias back into his hand. Whatever that's for, Dennis wants no part. 

"Last night...um, drinking contest. Right. Who won? Frank owes me some serious cash if we demolished those guys..." 

Mac stares at him for a minute. "Uh...no one actually won, dude, they all just left at one point." 

"Hey, what happened to that one guy..." And then it all comes rushing back. 

Now he knows why he smells like such a weird brand of cigarettes. He'd been shotgunning cigarettes with Brent, and then Mac had...

Mac is here...why the fuck is Mac here? With fucking flowers? 

"Mac, why the fuck did you bring flowers?" 

"Oh, I mean, so you do remember then? It seems like you remember. I was just...I didn't drink much last night..." Pfft. That's a lie - he went drink for drink with the rest of them - Mac can actually out-drink them all, though, so maybe he was relatively sober by comparison...

"Yeah," Mac continues, "I stayed up all night trying to talk to Dee, and then I talked to Charlie when she wouldn't listen to me any more, and I even asked Frank for his opinion...he was kind of a jerk about it...but they all said not to do anything traditional, because that would scare you away, but I think maybe secretly you do like traditional..." 

"Mac, I'm gonna...I'm gonna stop you right there. You..." 

"I bought you flowers!" 

"Fuck. Yeah. I see that." Dennis walks over to the couch and collapses back onto it, resting his head on the back and closing his eyes. 

"Sooo...do you not like the flowers, then?" Mac says, and there's a thunk as he sets the vase on the coffee table, and then the couch sinks with his weight next to Dennis. 

"Mac," Dennis says, turning to look at him. "We're almost forty fucking years old. Why did you buy me flowers?" 

"Because..." Mac shifts a little on the couch. "Because I wanted to woo you." 

"You wanted to _woo_ me? I'm not a girl, Mac." 

"Yeah, I know that." 

"Do you? Do you know that?" It's a little more pointed than he intended, and Mac flinches. 

"Yeah, that's fair. I should also tell you...well, you know how all our stuff burned down in the fire...?" He looks at Dennis like he's waiting to see if he needs to explain it, like Dennis might not know for some reason. 

"...Yes, Mac, I know all our stuff burned down in the fire, Jesus." 

"Right. So all our stuff burned down in the fire, and that meant all my badass crosses and my rosaries and..." 

"And all those creepy fucking posters, it all burned, yeah, Mac, I get the picture. So what?" 

"Right, so...I meant to go out and buy all that stuff again, but then we were at Dee's place, and it was so far away from that church I used to go to, and I had to get a taxi every time 'cause I knew you wouldn't drive me, and Dee refused to drive me too, and it got kinda expensive..." 

"Jesus, you couldn't take a bus or something? And what does this have to do with the stuff that burned?" 

Mac ignores the second question altogether. It's probably connected somehow in there most roundabout Mac way, like his old religious life got torn down and he needed to rebuild. He does answer the bus question, though. "Oooh, that's really smart, I didn't think of that...so anyway, I just stopped going altogether, right?" 

"Clearly. Makes sense." 

"I know, right?" And Mac understands sarcasm. He does. He's just obtuse. "So then I saw that thing with the whole gay man dating site thing you were on, and I was like, really mad at you, Dennis, I thought you didn't care about whether we'd end up in heaven together, and then I started thinking about why I cared about you going to heaven at all, and I thought it was because you were the most important person in my life, and I couldn't picture spending a day without you, much less all of eternity. That would just suck if you weren't there, Den. I could live without the rest of them...I mean, I'd miss Charlie, too, I guess, but not in the same way I'd miss you." 

"So...you...what. I'm not converting, and I'm not going to repent and turn straight, if that's what you're here for, so you can just leave if that's..." 

"No, I thought of that too, but then I saw you with all those guys dropping you off at the bar every day and...I was mad about that, too. You know? Because...it took me a long time to realize, but I think it was because I wanted to _be_ those guys. And that was really confusing until I realized I was gay." 

"Bravo, we've only been telling you this for years. So what about the whole eternal damnation thing, because I thought that was pretty locked in." 

"Yeah I started going to another church recently. It's way closer to Dee's and...they don't feel the same way about gay people at that church. I got into a lot of fights with people there, but they finally convinced me." He takes a deep breath and looks Dennis in the eye. Then he looks down at Dennis's jacket. "Why are you still wearing that? You should probably shower, dude." 

"I fucking would if you'd get to your point. You know what, I think I know what your point is, actually, may I?" 

Mac nods. 

"You're finally being honest with yourself, which I am happy about, really, I am, good for you. And you decided that since you're gay now, you're going to latch onto the first thing you see. I'm attractive, I know that, and you think that since I've been fucking guys, I'm the one you want. I'll save you the breath. You're wrong. We're friends, Mac. That's all this is. Now go...find yourself a...a twink or something and come back when you wanna just hang out." 

Mac is opening his mouth to protest, but Dennis gets up and tosses his jacket aside and unbuttons his jeans on the way to the shower, and that shuts him up, just like Dennis knew it would. He cranks the water in the shower and gets in while it's still cold, leaning against the wall and letting the water drain everything away. 

Oh, goddammit. Why didn't he lock the door?

Mac pulls open his curtain, and Dennis doesn't move an inch, because this will freak Mac out a lot more than it will him. Sure enough, Mac claps his hands over his eyes and turns halfway around before hesitating. 

Dennis sighs. "Did you want something?" 

Mac stands there for a minute. Dennis cranks the water up so it's steaming and waits. 

"I...I have more stuff to say. Can you get out so we can talk like...not-naked? Please?" 

Dennis huffs a laugh, feeling vindicated, and stares Mac down. "No." This will do it, for sure. Mac will be too uncomfortable, and he'll leave...

Mac turns slowly back around to face him, and his fingers peel back from his eyes. He looks straight at Dennis's dick. Figures. He jumps a little and closes his eyes again. 

"Okay, I'm just gonna..." His eyes are closed, and he's standing his ground, and apparently he's going through with this. Interesting. 

"Dennis, I know you're probably freaked out about all this, I am too. And I know you're probably worried about..." 

"Oh goddammit, did you barge in on my shower to give me some big emotional speech?" 

"Uh...I mean, yeah. I'm gay. That's kinda my thing now." 

"The emotional speech thing or the barging in on naked dudes thing?" 

"Uh...both, I guess? Anyway, like I was saying..." 

Well, so much for that. Dennis yanks the curtain closed. "Get out." 

"No, I'm...I mean, if you really want me to get out, I will, I don't want to make you uncomfortable or anything...do you want me to leave?" He pauses. "...Den?" 

Dennis sighs. "Goddammit, just...just get this over with." 

"Okay. Cool. So, I know you have this weird...thing, about relationships." 

Dennis groans in frustration and starts going through the motions of showering so he doesn't have to pay attention to this too closely. 

"And I just want you to know, that...I know I've been a total asshole. For a really long time. I mean, you have too, lots of times, but it's okay, right? Because we know where we stand with each other, and we're willing to overlook stuff. And I just want you to know...I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, and I think I could bottom for you." 

...The fuck? 

"I mean, clearly I'm a top, and I'd easily overpower you..."

Dennis pulls the curtain back just to look at Mac, because this is a complete 180 and...it's grotesque. And wrong. What? 

"But I was thinking, like, you're used to banging women..." 

"And men, Mac, in case you missed the last...what's it been, two? Three months now? Not to mention...you know what, why are we talking about this?" 

"Like, I'm saying, I know you're basically a sex addict, and I was thinking we need to keep things exciting if I'm gonna keep you interested..." 

"Oh, great, real romantic, you shithead, what are you doing? You expect this to be what makes me fall for you, or something?" 

"Oh...um. I just assumed we were already there. With how we've basically been in a relationship for years now, and then basically had sex too, you know, with all the times we pulled our dicks out when we watched you in the videos..." 

Holy shit. When Mac comes around on something...

"We were already in a relationship? Is what you're saying?" Dennis asks, just to make sure he's hearing this right, because it feels very sudden. 

"Uh, yeah, dude, we're like an old married couple already. And I know you'll probably still have loads of sex with women, but that's okay because you'll let me watch, and that'll make it better for you anyway, right, because you like the idea of me watching, it gets you off..." 

"Whaaaaat the fuck Mac, when did you get so fucking observant all of a sudden? What is this? Are you...are you on drugs or something?" 

"Pfft, no, that's just you and Dee. And Frank. And Charlie, with his spray paint and rat poison and shit. I'm kind of the only one not on drugs, if you think about it." 

Dennis's shower is starting to get cold, or at least less streaming hot, so he shuts off the water and steps out, grabbing a towel. 

"Well it sounds like you have everything figured out. Is there anything else? Since we're getting it all out in the open here?" 

"Uh...nope. Oh, I love you. Yep." 

Dennis cringes. 

"Oh, shit, no, it's okay, I know you love me, too. You don't know it, but you do. You only have meaningful emotional stuff with men. Which is...oh, that reminds me. No more fucking other dudes. 'Kay? Women, sure, whatever. But no dudes. That's...that's my only stipulation. That was not a happy time for me, watching you with all those guys. Everything else can be exactly the same. Well, maybe, I dunno, I was hoping we could also have sex, you and me, but otherwise just that one thing." 

Dennis raises his eyebrows. "No sex with other dudes. Got it." He knows he should be freaking out about this, but Mac is just so matter of fact about everything, and he supposes he just hasn't had the time to think about it too much. 

"Oh! Um, I know you like, do a whole routine thing with the cleaning and hair removal and shit so I'm gonna get outta your hair but I am gonna woo you, Dennis. I'm gonna go get you hangover food and I'm gonna go get all my shit from Dee's and I'll sleep on the couch if it makes you uncomfortable to like, share a bed just yet, but I am gonna do this Dennis. I am gonna make you love this. It's gonna be great. I know it probably seems like a lot, but I wanna do it, and...and you deserve it. And I love you. 'Kay. See you in...mmph," he's cut off by Dennis grabbing a handful of his shirt and yanking him in and kissing the ever-loving shit out of him. 

It's been said that Dennis Reynolds doesn't have emotions, is a sociopath, may be a criminal. He's not a good person. He toes the line of human decency regularly. He inserts himself into most of the situations around him with an air of casual confidence and he ends up destroying most of the things he tries. But he also keeps the gang in check, he fixes most of the things he breaks in a way that works out for his friends if not for everyone else, and he has a hell of a lot of fun doing it, even if they are the most exasperating bunch of assholes he's ever been around. 

Mac has always been his lodestone. His hyperactive, fucked up, idiotic, self-loathing loadstone who has somehow finally figured his shit out...not all his shit. Dennis is certain there will be loads of issues to largely ignore and maybe some big surprises from their past that they'll need to overcome. But just like the rest of the gang, nothing has or ever will come between them for long. They're better and worse together, and that's the way they like it. Dennis is so ready for this. And damn, Mac is actually really great in bed. He even gives Dennis five stars on Guy-raters when they're done, and Dennis decides to reward Mac by giving him his first-ever gay blow job. He totally has Mac under his thumb. 

This is going to be great.

**Author's Note:**

> Phew. I started writing this while I was in season 10, and by the time I finished, I was on s13e3. Not that it's been years - I'm new here, and this was all over the course of a few days. Just watching through for the first time. I'm supposed to be writing a thesis, so of course I crank out more than 15k of fanfic instead. Good writing practice, I guess. 
> 
> Anyway, I’m finally far enough in to see what some of you mean by s13 ruining things a little. Might write another fic set in s13 next. I'm still twitterpated over this show, though. 
> 
> Clarification/warnings: Dennis/other is largely implied, but there's one scene where he gets to second base with a guy. There’s not much sex in this at all tbh. Violence is a little rough, but mostly on the feels. Mac punches Dennis in the face a couple times before the gang separates them. Dennis instigates the fight and eggs Mac on. Because he’s kinda fucked up like that. 
> 
> Oh and for the record, Dennis is not the one holding the reins in this relationship, imo. 🤫We won’t ruin it for them.


End file.
